Category Archives: eBooks: General

By a 2-1 vote, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court judge that the conspiracy violated federal antitrust law, and that the judge acted properly in imposing an injunction to prevent a recurrence.

Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston said that by organizing the conspiracy, “Apple found an easy path to opening its iBookstore,” while ensuring that marketwide prices rose to a level that Apple and the publishers wanted.

The details are not clear yet, but the source says, “in broad strokes, the goal that [founder Aaron] Stanton and three of the folks he was working with from the original BookLamp crew is to beat Amazon at their own game.”

“I can tell you that in the next year to 18 months you will see some fairly major initiatives focused on books and reading coming out of Apple.”

Huh. And just earlier today I discussed the problem of Apple and eBooks with Baldur Bjarnason.

If Apple wants to boost sales, they have to treat books like books.

A Kindle book can be read on any damned platform — Kindle device, iOS, Android, Mac, PC.

Books bought from the Apple iBookstore are locked to Apple’s iOS and OS X hardware, period. Who wants book lock-in? No one.

Apple can think better recommendations will help, but if they want to be serious in selling books against Amazon — and with over one billion devices out there, they should — they need to liberate books from their Apple-only grasp.

And on the writer’s side of things, don’t require OS X hardware to submit to the iBookstore.